Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

The past is a very determined ghost, haunting every chance it gets.

The relationship between book and reader is intimate, at best a kind of love affair, and first loves are famously tenacious. [...] First love is a momentous step in our emotional education, and in many ways, it shapes us forever.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.